Category: Film

The military junta in Thailand arrested some youths for doing the “Hunger Games” salute outside a Bangkok theater during the film’s premiere.

The salute, which in the movies is a daring act of silent rebellion, began to appear here in the weeks after the May 22 coup. The authorities warned that anyone raising it in public could be subject to arrest.

Natchacha Kongudom, told reporters, “The three-finger sign is a sign to show that I am calling for my basic right to live my life.” Rungroj Yongrit/European Pressphoto Agency. Used without permission.

Talk about paranoia. The above image sort of looks like a group of friends going to see Mockingjay. But actually, the 3 women surrounding the protester are undercover cops. Who, apparently, were staking out the neighborhood cineplex.

The film was pulled from the theater. The kids were soon released from custody, but not before undergoing the kind of treatment which, in my day, my father often said I was in “serious” need:

Army officials later confirmed that the students were held for several hours for “attitude adjustment” and then released.

All of our grievances are connected.

There are individual heroes doing great things in this country, and they don’t make it to the news every night. A doctor who storms a panel on healthcare to demand that her colleagues join her in the streets. A woman who stands up in a Congressional hearing on deficit reduction to admonish her legislators: we all know how to end the deficit! End the wars! Tax the rich! A woman who bravely speaks to a crowd about her father, who had literally shot himself to death to avoid burdening his daughter with insurmountable hospital bills. This is the country we have made, and it is up to us to re-make it.

[UPDATE 2012-11-03: This movie is no longer available on Vimeo. Here is a trailer below.]

For shame! My homemade epic, “Child Killer,” has been removed from YouTube!

Dear portfola,

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video Child Killer. The audio content identified in your video is Break On Through by The Doors. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

I didn’t see that one coming, no. Since I first posted it online over two years ago, Child Killer has gotten maybe 100 views on YouTube, half of which I am accountable for – but one of those others was apparently a mole working for Warner Music Group, who successfully ferreted out HanftPort Productions’ flagrant violation of copyright law. The film does feature liberal playtime for “Break on Through” – it plays in at least two scenes, and total playtime amounts to nearly the entire song. I wonder what Warner would ask of our small independent label for the rights?

This episode follows another recent encounter I had with the agents of artistic and commercial integrity. In a letter last June, my local internet service provider informed me that

… we have received notification from one or more owners of copyrights claiming that their work has been transmitted over the Internet from your account without their permission… We are concerned that either you or a person with access to your account may be unknowingly participating in certain file sharing or server-related activities that led to this complaint.

Included with that letter are copies of emails sent to the ISP on behalf of HBO’s legal team requesting that my account be shut down for downloading the HBO original movie “Recount,” about the 2000 election (a most enjoyable film!) They had the details of the download, including the exact file name and size, and my IP address. Hard to argue with that.

It was just a warning. The ISP was very nice about it, really, taking pains to avoid outright accusing me, and assuring me that I would not lose my service or go to jail if I just stopped downloading stuff. HBO does not have my identity, although this post would give it away quite neatly if they cared to look. But really, they don’t. They just want to scare me into subscribing to HBO, which I won’t since it isn’t worth it, even with good movies like “Recount.” (Although I will miss Season 2 of “Flight of the Conchords,” which is bloody brilliant. Pity.)

Copyright law as it stands today is flawed. We still need laws to prevent people getting ripped off, but as Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing has put it, most musicians’ problem isn’t piracy, it’s anonymity. It’s obscurity. The idea is to get your stuff out there, not keep it away from people. This is the same for most artists in general. Of course it’s not true for large media conglomerates like WMG and Viacom.

We talked about this recently in the Junta, and I learned something very interesting. In the traditional business model of the music business, the only ones making money – real money – off records were the record companies. The artists lived off their advances, their ticket sales, their promotional deals, etc. and the only ones making real money off records were maybe the top 100 artists in the business. That business model is rapidly swirling down the drain.

So while we won’t have Child Killer on YouTube anymore, we’ll find somewhere else to host it. And while we won’t download HBO original movies anymore, we’ll surely continue sharing media with friends and strangers for a long time. As Doctorow has said, the technology for copying and sharing this stuff isn’t going to get any harder. Those who are smart enough to learn the new rules will prosper in the new era, and those who troll the internet looking for violators will be left in the dust.

As earlier promised, here it is, in all its glory. The original 1993 production from HanftPort pictures, Child Killer. A bit of background:

Dave and I started making movies as soon as my dad allowed us to touch the 8mm family video camera. We were around 10 years old. Naturally, much of what we shot was complete garbage. Not so naturally, my dad was completely frank in telling us this when we showed him our work.

“The lighting is terrible, you can hardly hear what anybody’s saying, the camera never moves – I mean really, this one scene is like 20 minutes long with the camera in one place – and there’s no plot. It’s awful!”

This encouraged us to improve production. Child Killer, filmed when we were both about 13 and, I believe, about to begin the eighth grade at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood, NJ, represents the height of our output.

To be sure, the film is incomplete. As were all our films. Usually we would work on a project without a complete script, just filming as we went along, and taking scenes into the editing room as they were finished. Eventually we got bored and started a new movie entirely. We never finished a single film, to my knowledge.

Child Killer shows us in our prime, bringing all our technical knowledge to bear. We had saved up money for editing machines which we used to write text, lay over sound, and distort the video with primitive effects like strobe, paint and mosaic. We even added sound effects to amplify the punching, and of course, the gunshot sound was taken from Sniper.

When we laid this on our family, everyone, including my dad, was blown away. Everybody jumped at the part when Dave shoots Gia, with its vivid bloodtrail and loud gunshot (thanks, Tom Berenger). And then they all laughed and laughed, because the whole thing is just ridiculous.

The “plot” is pretty simple. Juvenile psycho Joe Didley (Dave) goes on a killing rampage in which he brutally murders his best friend Joshua (Rindy), Joshua’s sister Susan (Gia), Susan’s friend Cameron (Cameron Hanft, Dave’s sister) and some kid who witnesses Cameron’s murder, presumably her brother (Will Portfolio). There is no rhyme or reason to the killings, other than violence being the best situation in which two young, aspiring filmmakers could convey their teenage angst as well as their technical skills. Oh, if only we’d had iMacs in those days…

Major props are due to my dad, for letting us use the camera, for rightly deriding our poor intial efforts, thereby inspiring us to do better, and for digging this video up somewhere last year and burning it to DVD as a Christmas present for me.

UPDATE, Jan. 8, 2008: Child Killer has been removed from YouTube for violating copyright. A fine legacy for HanftPort pictures. For more read this.

UPDATE July 2012: At some point, they put the video back online but removed the sound, which offended the copyright lords: